Our MMORPG enthusiast Karsten Scholz has played countless online role-playing games over the decades. The 22-year-old TORN is not one of them. However, this MMO currently has more players than ever.
One of the many nice things about being an editor is that you can still be surprised and constantly learn or experience new things even after many years. Although I have been playing MMORPGs for 21 years and have been dealing with the genre almost daily since 2009, I had never heard of TORN until recently.
This is a text-based online role-playing game that has been leading thousands of players worldwide into the eponymous Torn City since 2004. There you will find a very grim but modern metropolis where the criminal underworld holds power. Accordingly, you can rise from a poor rookie to a criminal and amass a fortune with your heists.
You can form cooperations, trade, rock the stock market, get married, gamble, beat other players into the hospital, found factions, visit a gym, hit the books, start a business, and much more.
But how did I just find out about TORN? Through a remarkable status update from the creator of the MMORPG, Joe Chedburn: TORN celebrated its first time with over 100,000 daily active players at the end of April. That has never happened in the previous 21 years. On torn.com, Chedburn writes:
Breaking the five-digit mark on the visitor counter on the login page has been a long-time dream of mine – one that I honestly never thought would be possible. Just a few years ago, I wondered if our database infrastructure and our complex code could even realistically handle such numbers.
To put that into perspective: In January 2024, the number of daily active players on Torn was 48,515. In just over two years, that number has more than doubled, and today it has exceeded the 100,000 mark for the very first time.
What accounts for the sudden increase in players? Joe Chedburn explains that they have been working hard lately to increase Torn’s capacity to accommodate more players. For that, they needed to extensively optimize the infrastructure and the code.
More about the best genre in the world can also be found on the YouTube channel of MeinMMO. A new video about the biggest MMO release of the year 2026 has just been released there:
Furthermore, they have intensified their advertising and PR efforts, which has proven to be enormously effective. Unfortunately, Chedburn does not reveal the details of what these efforts looked like. However, various very positive player reviews from the end of 2025 are rotating on the website. It says, for example:
“The best game of all time – it takes some time to get used to it, but it’s just fantastic. You should definitely download it.”
Whatever it was, it seems to be working very well for the TORN team right now. In the past 24 hours, more than 100,000 players were online again (101,192).
If you want to take a look, you can register a new character at torn.com and get started right away. TORN is Free2Play, has its own wiki integrated on the website, and even has a sort of daily newspaper with current stock prices, job requests, bounties, comics, and more. Here you can find out which other free online role-playing games we can recommend this year: The 12 best Free-to-play MMORPGs 2026 in comparison
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